Florida Forward

For those of you who had "Day 4" in your office pool for when I'd stop blogging daily, you are the big winner :)

In this particular instance, my family and I left for Miami for Florida Forward on Wednesday and returned Sunday evening. 4 straight 16 hour workdays, 300+ particiapants at various levels, and a priceless experience later, I 'm back in the office and taking a moment to record it.

This was a huge weekend for our Association and for the University of Florida, as well as for me in my new role personally. I was able to meet our Alumni Association's Board of Directors that include alumni like Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, 1996 Heisman Trophy winner Danny Wuerffel, and business school namesake Al Warrington.

It was a great weekend and as former Association President Al Warrington said at the Board meeting on Saturday morning:

"I thought last night was one of the best nights in the University of Florida’s history.  It was exciting, captivating and will be the Launchpad for the future"

While I've only been on the job for a little over a week, this was great to hear.

What most people won't see, or ever know occurred was from the ground up here at Emerson Alumni Hall. Every participant received a binder for this conference... Board Members had different things in theirs than regular participants. The Executive Committee had a different binder than the rest of the board... and Returning members who already had a binder. A tireless group of individuals had to make the copies of the items for those binders and put them together. I don't think any of the attendees and participants will ever know or appreciate what went into putting this event together, but I saw the Cicerones, student employees and interns, and staff work on the binders, bag stuffing, gifts, booklets, etc... and I am blown away by it.

I've been to a ton of conferences and stayed up late and woke up early for a good number of them. However, being one of the staff responsible for making this event a success, and having the emotional investment of time and energy in it explains why I feel like a Zombie today.

I can't imagine how tired the staff that were in place and working on this all year are. Kudos to them.

I am excited about the future of the University of Florida and am inspired to grow our membership in the upcoming years. Our credo leaving the conference has been: Grow Membership. Grow Opportunity. Grow Value. I look forward to doing that and after this weekend of seeing the Gator Nation at it's best, I'm confident that there are no limits to what we can do.

Until next time... Go Gators!